A similar effort at Harvard showed one thing: unless
students were told explicitly to use a debugger and
the repl, they wouldn't do it. Otherwise they couldn't
establish any valid conclusion. (Still, they really
hated this conclusion so the effort was 'improved'.)
-- Matthias
On Aug 23, 2007, at 10:43 PM, Matt Jadud wrote:
> On 8/23/07, Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>> I presume you mean "instrument".
>> It's been a long day. :)
>>> What were your findings re. BlueJ?
>> It was difficult to draw good statistical results from the data
> collected regarding their compilation behavior because the data was
> partial---opportunistic, if you will---and only collected when
> students were using public PCs on campus. This meant in-lab behavior
> and any programming they did outside of class, on-campus. From what I
> could see, I had a complete picture of some students programming
> throughout the term, and for others, very little. It isn't an easy
> observation to carry out, and it is rich/complex data to work with.
>> That said, there were clear qualitative differences. At the least, I
> believe that visualization of these behaviors can have diagnostic
> value in formative contexts in the classroom, and possible other
> applications. As soon as I'm a bit more settled (i.e. I have moved
> into my apartment, etc.), I'll be diving into some of that data again.
>> I think I might have an opportunity this term to pilot the capture of
> some of the same kind of data in Scheme. I suspect, from some things I
> saw at IUB, that there will be some similarities of behavior, but I'd
> rather have some real data in my hands to start assessing that.
>> Cheers,
> M
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